A Linux Newbie’s Introduction To Minislack

After a decade of admiring Linux from afar, Claus Futtrup finally takes the plunge, choosing to dual-boot his Windows 98 system with Minislack. In this interesting guest column at DesktopLinux.com, Futtrup explains why he selected Minislack, and relates his experiences with installing, configuring, and using it as a newcomer to Linux.

15 Comments

This article is well-written, and the author did his research before picking a distribution. One of the things he doesn’t talk about though, is hardware support. How hard was it to configure his hardware as a first-time user? Did Minislack detect everything right away?

2005-07-09 10:22 pm

Regarding hardware detection – I was “overprepared” … from the old days my impression was (Slackware, 1992) that you had to know very single chip in the machine. No more – detection generally went fine. My soundcard (old Creative Soundblaster Live 128) can give me a bit of trouble. I check with Windows 98. When it works (after pushing the card into its slot) in Windows I reboot into Linux, and then it works with alsa as well. No glitches.

Best regards,

Claus Futtrup

2005-07-06 7:55 pm

I have been using Slackware for years and I installed Mini Slack because I seem to re-install my OSs fairly often, and its a pain always going through the slackware packages, removing stuff I don’t need.

Regarding the hardware setup… I had a LOT of trouble getting the nVidia drivers to install and I’ve never had that problem before on any other distro. Also, my TV card didn’t work, but it does in Slackware without touching anything.

The distro was nice and I’m sure a lot of people would like it, but it feels like it needs a bit more refinement to me.

I’m a Slackware user, and a Vector Linux user (which is based on Slackware) – whilst i’m a big Slackware fan, I recently installed minislack and didn’t find it very appealing, I had hoped that it would make my old laptop more usable, but it was actually no faster than Slackware-current. One really interesting thing it did have though was Reiser4 – which, as far as i’m aware, very, very few distributions ship with.

Minislack was ok, but no better than Slackware or Vector, but more to the point, how on earth could it be considered a distribution for newbies? SUSE, Mandriva, Fedora maybe – but Slackware/Minislack? I think it’s more intermediate/advanced if you ask me.

This guy explains how his choice for Minislack – and I paraphrase a bit here – “counters the conventional wisdom for choosing a newbie distro”.

2005-07-06 9:54 pm

i had minislack on on my p2 box for a while and it was ok but i replaced it with vector soho (which runs very well even with the slow cpu and kde)…. i’ve also run slackware, suse, fedora core, and gentoo on that system…

vector soho 5.0 is by far my favorate that i have run on that box, it’s fast, stable, current, and holy crap.. it autodetected my integrated sound on my old compaq deskpro (which no other distro has ever done… in fact.. i’ve never been successful in getting sound to work with any other distro

I found the article to be very well-written and thought out. One point I would like to make. LILO is perfectly safe to use on a Windows MBR as long as you have a) a windows XP install cd or b)a win98/dos 7.22 floppy disk with a copy of fdisk on it so that you can restore the MBR if something bad happens. LILO failed to install properly once (my fault)I popped in my keydrive (formatted as a win98 boot disk because I don’t have a floppy drive) and at the command prompt typed fdisk /mbr

restart and windows boots fine. then I was able to use my linux boot cd to reinstall LILO in rescue mode when I decided to fix the config file and reinstall LILO. GNU/linux is crazy complicated at first, but with time, it is worth learning the fine points. cheers on a great article!

2005-07-07 7:48 am

I think slackware is good in the sense that it complies to the standard. You don’t have to do things in a specific distro’s way. I am talking about this based on experience, of course.

I have tried many different distros over the years. Almost all have its own way of doing things. Sometimes a simple “./configure” or “make” doesn’t work on other distros but when you try it on slackware, it just works!

So, I think it can be considered a distro for newbies, who would like to learn to do things in a general way.

But there is one thing I don’t like about slackware. It is its lack of support for i18n. It doesn’t even come with CJK fonts

2005-07-07 2:45 pm

>>Regarding the hardware setup… I had a LOT of trouble getting the nVidia drivers to install and I’ve never had that problem before on any other distro. <<

I gave up on CRUX for the same reason.

2005-07-07 2:46 pm

i been a longtime Slackware user and Slackware always let me configuse my soundcard with rc.modules manually, MiniSlack tried to configure it automatically, i have a soundcard with a es1371 chip on it, but MiniSlack identified it as something else than what the card really is, MiniSlack seems like a good idea but i think i will stick with the origional Slackware…

i wish MiniSlack good luck and sucess with the venture…

one thing though, with Slackware a user can simply just not install GNome & KDE and opt for a light WM like xfce or WindowMaker and have a mini Slackware anyway…

I’ve tried the last several Minislack releases and continue to like it very much. I’m looking forward to further enchancements and am anxious to see just how far Minislack can go.

Thanks for taking the time to put your own Minislack experience online.

2005-07-07 10:47 pm

I just don’t get it, what’s the point of using minislack instead of, let’s say, slackware current?..

What’s the big advantage?.. They promise 1gb or something after install – my slack is not much bigger. Installing nvidia driver and upgrading to 2.6 kernel was a serious pain in the ass with this distro – they just do not include a kernel source at all so it’s a no-no to compile nvidia driver on the place. Kernel story was even more sad – system refused to boot at all.

2005-07-09 10:17 pm

Hi – this is the original author at DesktopLinux. I just by coincidence saw these messages. Regarding Nvidia, I have a RIVA TNT2 card – no problems. Instead of fishing around with Nvidia drivers I recommend to start with nv. That’s how I succeeded (plus a couple of attempts with xorgconfig to get the display settings right).

Regarding kernel. Minislack comes with netpkg, all you have to do is write “netpkg kernel-source” … or something like that. It comes right down onto your harddrive, and you can then fiddle with the NVidia driver (people have been successful with this, but I havn’t felt like dealing with it – ask in the forum for help, if you need it).